House of Meetings: A Novel

A haunting, gothic love triangle set in postwar Moscow and an Arctic gulag, where forbidden passion and betrayal shape destinies and echo across decades.

House of Meetings is a gothic love story steeped in violence. In 1946 Moscow, amid the palpable threat of pogroms, two brothers and a Jewish girl are drawn together in a fateful, tangled dance of desire and rivalry. Their destinies entwine further in the hellish Norlag labor camp above the Arctic Circle, where an enigmatic encounter in the House of Meetings will leave indelible marks on all three. What begins as a brief, forbidden tryst lingers long after the brothers’ release, haunting their every step.

For the narrator, the triangle’s sole survivor, echoes of that night continue to reverberate into the new century. As he writes to his American stepdaughter, his tale becomes a confession of love and betrayal. Harrowing and unforgettable, Martin Amis’s House of Meetings is a work of staggering intimacy and far-reaching consequence.